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Randy Liew
Randy is an old school friend whom I have known since our teenager years. Where we were younger, we practiced wushu, lion dance, and dragon dance together. We also enjoyed playing bastketball. He developed his career in the F&B sector, and later, he became a brewmaster. I thought that is very cool, and I interviewed him for my book.
You can connect with him on LinkedIn.
Randy's Story
Randy Liew’s career was never about a straight climb or a polished plan. It was shaped by restlessness, failure, reinvention, and an enduring need to create something with his own hands.
Growing up in Ipoh, Malaysia, Randy was fascinated by the idea of seeing the world. “I just wanted to explore—to see if there were interesting things out there,” he recalled. At 18, with little money and few qualifications, he left home to work sales jobs across Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Johor Bahru. He made good money early, but poor financial decisions brought a painful lesson. After falling hard, he returned briefly to Ipoh before deciding he couldn’t stay still. With only a small sum in his pocket, he took a leap of faith and moved to Singapore.
His early years in Singapore were driven by survival rather than ambition. After working in sales for a glassware company, Randy was retrenched during the downturn in 2000. Determined not to return to Malaysia, he took a job at BreadTalk—not as a manager, but as a baker. He wore a uniform, punched a timecard, and learned to make bread from scratch. “I just needed food on the table,” he said. “I was willing to take any job.”
What began as a necessity became a turning point. BreadTalk was expanding rapidly, and Randy’s reliability and curiosity stood out. He became the assistant to a Japanese consultant and traveled across Asia supporting franchise openings in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Philippines. When he joined, BreadTalk had 12 outlets in Singapore. When he left two and a half years later, it had expanded into six countries with over 100 outlets. Still, Randy chose to move on, sensing that comfort was setting in.
In his mid-20s, he tried entrepreneurship—co-founding an Indonesian restaurant concept, Warung Penyet. The business expanded quickly, but the partnership fell apart. He walked away with nothing. A second attempt, partnering with a Japanese restaurateur, ended the same way. “I was young, ambitious, and also stupid,” he admitted. These failures triggered the hardest period of his life. Unable to find work and without permanent residency, Randy was forced to leave Singapore in 2008. He fell into depression and openly acknowledged having suicidal thoughts during that period.
The turning point came when he was offered a chance to manage a new outlet for RedDot BrewHouse in 2009. The role played to his strengths—operations, people, systems—and the outlet was a success. That success led to an even bigger opportunity: launching Level33, then the world’s highest urban microbrewery, located in Singapore’s financial district. At just 29, Randy became one of the youngest operations managers in the industry, overseeing everything from staffing and service design to customer flow.
By most measures, he had “made it.” Yet after two years, he felt boxed in. “What other operations managers were doing at 55, I was already doing at 29,” he reflected. When the brewing team at Level33 left, Randy made a radical move. He took a 40% pay cut and asked to start again—this time as a junior brewer. “It was either I leave, or you let me change roles,” he told his boss.
For months, his work involved cleaning brewing tanks. He embraced it as a necessary reset. Knowing skill—not title—would define his future, Randy enrolled in a demanding UK brewing program while working full-time. He failed his first exam, passed the next, and persisted through years of study. In 2016, after more than six years of immersion, he left Level33 ready to stand on his own.
Randy was hired as Brewmaster at Pump Room, where he led innovation, mentored brewers, and helped the brand win Best Brewery awards in 2018 and 2019. He became one of only a handful of brewmasters in Singapore—and the only Asian brewmaster at the time. Yet even success came with impermanence. When Pump Room closed due to structural business constraints, Randy once again found himself starting over.
This time, he did so on his own terms. He founded Thirsty Asia and began working as an independent brewing consultant across Southeast Asia. His work expanded beyond beer into culturally rooted beverages, including helping develop sparkling Tuak from Borneo, bringing indigenous fermentation traditions onto a global stage. “I’m doing exactly the same job,” he said, “but now I’m living up to my full potential.”
Most recently, Randy has returned to the restaurant industry—this time as an owner—launching an Indonesian Ayam Penyet concept, coming full circle to where one of his earliest ventures began. Alongside this, he continues advising breweries, mentoring younger brewers, and contributing to the craft ecosystem across the region.
Randy’s journey is not a story of linear progress, but of choosing meaning over comfort. “If you don’t do what you love,” he once quoted, “you’ll never love what you do.” For him, career transformation was not a single leap—but a series of honest resets, each grounded in humility, craft, and persistence.
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